The image was created by David Heeger, Hagit Hel-Or, and Brian Wandell by combining an image of the human eye with small versions of illustrations from the book "Foundations of Vision.". The images were all digitally created or scanned and combined using image processing tools written in Matlab. The contrast and color of the smaller images were adjusted by an automatic process to match that of the large image. Depending on the viewing distance, the large image or the smaller images will be more salient.
Similar images appear on the cover and frontispiece of the book "Foundations of Vision" by Brian Wandell (Sinauer Associates, Inc. 1995).